No bidders for Iqbal Mirchi's two flats in Mumbai

The auction of two plush properties of late gangster and drug trafficker Iqbal Mirchi here was cancelled on Tuesday due to lack of proper bids, an official said.

The Ministry of Finance's office did not got proper bids for the two flats, leading to cancellation of their auction, he said.

These flats belonging to Mirchi, a close associate of global terrorist Dawood Ibrahim, are located in a building named Milton Apartments on Juhu Tara Road in suburban Santa Cruz (West), he said.

The flats are among six properties in Mumbai whose auction was scheduled on Tuesday under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act (SAFEMA) and the Narcotics Drug and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPSA), the official said.

The reserve price for Mirchi's flats, ad measuring 1,245 square feet, was kept at Rs 3.45 crore, he said.

"As no bidder reached the price we were expecting in the auction, we cancelled the bidding for those properties," said Additional Commissioner (SAFEMA) R N D'souza.

"We will try again with a new process in the next two months and with a new price," he said, adding a public notice for the auction will be sent out.

"However, there were bidders for two other properties, belonging to gold smuggler D Kader Haji, and we got the expected rates for them," he said.

There was no word from officials on the remaining two properties whose auction was also scheduled on Tuesday.

Mirchi's properties were put up for auction in pursuance of previous cases filed and probed against him. The notorious drug trafficker died in London in August 2013.